Dr. William Crowley

Dr. William Crowley is the incumbent Daniel K. Podolsky Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the founding and emeritus Chief of the Reproductive Endocrine Unit in the Department of Medicine at Mass. General Hospital. He is an Adjunct Faculty member of the Broad Institute’s Medical Population Genetics Program and serves as the Director/Principle Investigator of the NIH-funded Harvard-wide Reproductive Endocrine Sciences Translational Research Center. He was the founding Director of The Clinical Research Program at the Mass. General Hospital from 1996-2014 and has had 43 consecutive years of competitive funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Crowley pioneered the use of GnRHa to treat children with precocious puberty, a therapy that remains the treatment of choice now nearly 40 years later. He was also the first to use pulsatile GnRH therapy to induce sexual maturation and fertility in men and induce ovulation in women lacking sexual maturation. He defined the human disease model of Isolated GnRH Deficiency (IGD). He has used IGD to chart the physiology of the human reproductive system during its therapy. IGD has also provided a platform for his broad new gene program that has begun to define the genetic architecture of normal human sexual development. To achieve these accomplishments, he has used a wide spectrum of novel clinical research techniques and complementary basic scientific approaches to support his human research program.

Dr. Crowley has also trained over 90 pre- and post-doctoral scientists for academic careers in biomedical research. Over 80% of these trainees currently remain active in academic settings with 50% of those who trained with him 10 years ago or more now occupying full Professorships around the world. Notably, 68% of these trainees have been women resulting in his being named “Mentor of the Year” by Women in Endocrinology in 2001, the first time their award was given to a male. He has served as the President of The Endocrine Society; received The Clinical Research Awards from the NIH and the Endocrine Society; the International Juried Award in Endocrinology from the Ipsen Foundation and The Fred Conrad Koch Award, the Endocrine Society’s highest scientific achievement award.